Builders of the Adytum is one of the clearest examples of the modern esoteric order run as a graded correspondence course, and its distinctive feature is the instrument it teaches through.
The Tarot as curriculum
Founded in the United States in the early 1920s by Paul Foster Case, a former member of a Golden Dawn successor body, the school presents the Tarot and the Kabbalah as the twin keys of the Western mystery tradition, and it teaches them through graded lessons that members study at home. A characteristic exercise has the student colour a deck of Tarot keys by hand according to the instruction of the lessons, so that the images are learned by making them. The school describes itself as a religious and educational body rather than a religion in the ordinary sense.
After the founder
Case led the order from Los Angeles, and after his death in 1954 it continued under Ann Davies and then under later leadership, spreading through affiliated groups in several countries. Its structure places the weight of the teaching on the printed lessons and the organisation behind them rather than on a resident temple or a face-to-face initiatory chain, which is the feature it shares with the other correspondence-based orders of the twentieth century and which distinguishes it from the lodge tradition it descends from.